You can tell that a civilzation is just about finished when it
begins punishing activities on the basis, not of their actual
criminalitywho got hurt and how badlybut of their political
correctness.

Or lack thereof.

A fairly egregious case in point is that of a teenager convicted
of careless driving, who managed to kill two of his friends late last
year and, after sufficient tears and abject apologies, got a fine this
week and probation. Oh, yeah, and he won't be able to drive a car
again.

Until he's 18.

On the other hand, another teenager had photos made of himself
with a lot of guns (he had permission from his parents to do it) and
posted them on MySpace, that latest menace (after video arcades in the
80s and soft drinks in the 90s) to Stepfordian peace and order in the
suburbs. It seems that, no longer content to oppress children in the
dungeonsoops, I mean classroomstaxpayers are forced to provide
them with, the public school system has begun prowling the Internet
for signs of wrongthink. It's just another reason that the school
system should be abolished, its buildings razed to the ground so that
not one stone is left standing upon another, and salt sown on the
ruins.

For nothing more than the "crime" of exercising his Constitutional
right to own and carry weapons, this poor kid is getting the book
thrown at him by the mass media (what else would you expect?), his
school (in fact, this is a valuable lesson for him and for all of us),
the state government (disobeying its own highest law), and the feds,
even though the law he's supposed to have broken specifically allows
for parental permission to have and use (and presumably be seen with)
guns.

Partly this is happening because the mass media continue willfully
to misunderstand what occurred at Columbine High School and draw all
the wrong lessons from it. They will gleefully fuck this boy's life up
beyond recognition simply because it lets them extend their inhumane
and illegal policy of victim disarmamentthese are the same moral
retards who would rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled
with her own pantyhose than see her with a gun in her handto
children.

For the benefit of the morons in government and media who missed
the point the first hundred times, Columbine happened not because
there were too many guns there that day, but because there were too
few.

But the "findings" of the kangaroos-in-charge in the present case
are intended to have far-reaching consequences. The first and most
obvious is that some prosecutor clearly expects the act of suppressing
a teenager's fundamental rightsnever forget how terrified suburban
liberals have become of their own childrento advance his career
significantly.

I'm strongly reminded of a somewhat similar case, a few years ago,
when a vicious female prosecutor in another western state railroaded a
small handful of young people into prison because they ... well now,
I'm not really sure what the "because" is, here. I know one of them,
and to this day, even he doesn't know what crimeif anyhe
committed.

Shades of Martha Stewart.

At the time, it appeared that he and his friends were convicted of
teaching each other to shootin short, of breaking a law that
doesn't exist. Nonetheless, they were given a catchily scary name by
the round-heeled press, and bundled off to the slammer, while the
prosecutor rode her victims' broken backs straight into the governor's
mansion.

Contrary to what the Founders intended, law, to cops, politicians,
and other parasites these days, is whatever they make up as they go
along.

But there's a longer-term object here that the enemies of liberty
are pursuing. If we can't put guns in our children's hands, if we
can't teach them to use them safely and effectively, then what the
media delight in calling the "gun culture"meaning those who think
the Bill of Rights is importantis doomed to extinction. Several
years ago, I coined an appropriate phrase for the phenomenon: cultural
genocide.

Around about the same time, I also said that those who would
outlaw weapons must begin by outlawing knowledge of weapons, and those
who would outlaw knowledge of weapons must finally outlaw knowledge
itself.

The public school systema socialist enterprise that can't seem
to teach kids to read, write, or even count, but can shake them down,
sample their body fluids, rifle their lockers, rummage through their
purses, briefcases, and bookbags, and spy on them cybernetically on
MySpacehave made a good start on outlawing knowledge itself, I
think.

Don't you?

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has
been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics
of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The
American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach,
Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches,
Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website
"The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel
Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a
literary home.

A decensored, e-published version of Neil's 1984 novel, TOM
PAINE MARU is available at:
http://payloadz.com/go/sip?id=137991.
Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the
epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo"
May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The
Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was
published by BigHead Press
www.bigheadpress.com
has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at
www.Amazon.com,
or at BillOfRightsPress.com.